Although I strive to do creative work, I tend to approach my goals regarding that work in an extremely methodical fashion. Sooner or later, some voice in my head will suggest: “You know what would help you break this down? A SPREADSHEET“. Oooh, yummy spreadsheets. Call it the whole-brained approach to the writing life.
My campaign to get short stories published in lit mags spawned a spreadsheet, naturally enough. What better way to contain and sort the various magazines and include their weblinks, the work I submitted, and the response time, so I can track what’s currently-pending, and who’s rejected me in the past? Ultimately we are just shooting an arrow into a dark room and hoping we hit a bulls-eye, but if you can pre-select only the rooms that actually have bulls-eyes IN THEM, then it still boils down to luck but it least you are wasting fewer arrows.
As the Internet has evolved, one of my ground-rule assumptions is that no matter how nerdy or OCD I get about a certain something, someone else out there who can actually code will already have trumped me. So, when yesterday I finally learned about the existence of Duotrope’s Digest, an amazingly sortable database of literary outlets, it was not so much the sense that I’d never seen or imagined a wheel before, it was more a relief that someone else had already perfected it, so I didn’t have to keep whanging away on my own.
This site has statistical data on over 3,000 literary magazines, websites, and the like. You can search by form (poetry, flash fiction, short stories, novellas, etc.), by length, by genre, subgenre, theme (have you written a piece of Satirical Paranormal Erotica with an Environmental theme? You can search for a home for that!) You can filter if they are web-only or have a printed component, by whether they accept previously-published work or simultaneous submissions, whether they accept electronic submissions; and, most importantly, by whether they pay their writers.
As a FREE registered user, I can input basic data about the type of material I am submitting and to whom I am submitting it. And, as myself and other writers contribute, it builds an overall picture of how long certain magazines take to reply, what the percentage chance of being accepted there is, and what styles of material play well there. When I think of how many little writer’s clubs and message boards and advice books there are out there, none of them apply the kind of crowd-sourcing muscle you’re going to get here. All that, and it’s ultimately less work for me to do what I’d been doing on my own with my feeble little spreadsheet.
So not only did I join, not only am I feeding it every bit of submission data I’ve tracked, but I’ve made a small donation to help keep it free so other aspiring writers can enjoy the benefits of this massively-useful tool. If you want to try and get published, or know someone else who does, send them, post-haste.